Victor Montori is a highly regarded endocrinologist and Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in the US. In this book he distils his important ideas, years of experience, and hundreds of publications into a series of heartfelt and personal essays exploring the state of modern medicine and his thoughts on why and how things need to change. Using patient stories and poetic language, this book lays bare the failings of industrialised medicine. Although much of the book is centred on the health service in the US, the themes of greed, cruelty, and burden will be unnervingly familiar to clinicians around the world. By focusing on patients and their stories, we see through their eyes the impact that a broken healthcare system has on the lives of those we seek to help, and we can’t fail to be left dismayed and disheartened. But this is a book of optimism, of hope, and of the future. After illustrating the problems we face, we are guided through a series of short and thematically linked chapters to an elegant and achievable solution. Health care has stopped caring, but this book allows us to see that, through the compassion and kindness of individuals, patients and clinicians can rediscover the remarkable power of caring.
The book challenges us, and our patients, to use its ideas as a call to arms — to start a revolution for careful and kind care. Beautifully written, with an elegantly simple and though-provoking message, I recommend it wholeheartedly, and, once you have read it, pass it on to someone else. We need a change in health care, and this may be the answer.
